“The Fall of Paris” as “the End of Modernism”: Eschatology, War and Ilya Ehrenbourg in a Succession of Cultural Mirrors

The article analyzes Ilya Ehrenbourg’s novel “The Fall of Paris&8j1; (1942) against the background of synchronic and diachronic cultural contexts. The author pays special attention to the mythologization of Paris from the middle of the 19^th century and to the ideological consequences of the country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The work reconstructs the system of Ehrenbourg’s “eschatological journalism&8j1; during the First World War and shows the connection of the writer’s novel with the cultural background of France “between two wars&8j1;. The novelist’s polemical dialogue with Jean Giraudoux on the Franco-German value-cultural collisions is demonstrated. It is concluded that for Ehrenbourg, as for a number of his Western brethren and recent researchers, the fall of Paris in 1940 was a sign of the end of the entire traditional West of Modern Times, and more specifically, the era of Modernism.

Literature and War, Modernism, Lament for a City